Best Buy's surprisingly soft holiday sales are showcasing a challenge facing many brick-and-mortar retailers: Customers just aren't coming to stores like they used to.

The Wall Street Journal uses the Best Buy announcement — which triggered a big selloff in the retailer's shares on Thursday — as an opportunity to look at customer traffic trends. And they're not very pretty.

Total retail foot traffic in 2013 was 17.6 billion visits, down from more than 30 billion in 2010. And the amount of new retail space has plummeted since 2008, and it hasn't recovered much since the recession ended.

A big chunk of Best Buy's turnaround efforts has been to shrug off the "showrooming effect" and get people into stores, where it's confident that it can turn them into buyers. But if they don't come in to begin with, that doesn't work.

Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly acknowledged the problem, saying that Best Buy had a big Thanksgiving weekend, but customer visits dropped off afterward.

But as the Star Tribune notes, Joly said the company wouldn't change its strategy and argued that Best Buy still managed to win market share over its rivals. (Best Buy is also working to boost its e-commerce presence, which avoids the store-traffic issue.)

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